What Made You Tell Me That?

Technology can be a grand thing. Recently, I've joined all the "young folks" in the whole world and signed up on Facebook. It is, for me, a great way to stay in touch with my children and family members. What I never expected, and didn't anticipate, is that Facebook is also a gateway to reconnecting with friends from my past -- some of them from my far, distant past.



Doing that -- reconnecting -- is an interesting undertaking. People that I've been out of touch with for years and decades knew me when my life, and my presentation in the world was very different. They knew me as a young mother; as a dedicated wife; as a professional and career business woman. People who were friends when I was in my 20s and 30s knew me to be pretty straight-laced. I may have espoused some pretty liberal political views, but if you looked at me, I was living the life that we were all told was our aspiration: husband, home, kids, job...



So, when I start a conversation with a person from my past (and I've done that a couple of times in the last couple of weeks), there is a giant gap to bridge. One thing I've discovered in these last few years is that there is no "gentle" way to broach the subject of my lifestyle with a potential friend. If you don't already know about it, probably because you met me through this blog, then the news is likely to come as a surprise, at the very least. My experience has been that it isn't usually a welcome surprise.



In the last year or so, I've gotten into a routine of simply telling people the plain truth in the very early stages of saying, "Oh my gosh! It is so neat to find you again!" It is a little tricky, to be sure. Most of these conversations devolve very quickly to an exposition of what has changed in the conventional sense -- marriages, kids and careers, and the latest vacation trip. That makes it sort of complicated to just casually drop in the news that I am living as a polyamorous, BDSM slave and masochist. Oh yeah, and I've been coloring my hair for years, too...



I think I can pretty well predict what sort of response I am likely to get. It is always possible that people are going to be way more open-minded than they were back when we were all much younger, but the reality is that it is rare for people to get more liberal in their thinking as they age. Most often people's views have narrowed, and there are plenty of my former acquaintances who have gotten apallingly conservative over the intervening years.



So, the question becomes (and one old friend actually asked exactly this): "Why did you tell me that after just a couple of email messages?"



The most important reason for telling the truth, in the very beginning is that it is important to me, if I am going to invest in building relationship with someone, to create a space that is honest. For me, BDSM isn't just something that is "sex," although there is surely that component to it. It weaves through most of my life, so if I'm going to have any sort of real relationship, it does necessitate that there be some awareness of that facet of my life. I spend so much of my life in hiding (I teach in a Catholic school for pity's sake) that when I form friendships my preference is that I not have to do that. I've found that it doesn't get easier to tell people about my life "later." If I get into talking with someone and then spring that information about myself on them after some months, it generally just pisses them off. Easier to just get it out in the open up front. Then people can make their own choice about whether to talk with me or not...



swan